A World Land Trust initiative is putting a webcam in the Ecuadorian rainforest to keep an eye on the many endangered species, using the internet as a tool for conservation.
The project has been set up in the Fundación Jocotoco Buenaventura Reserve in south-west Ecuador, and it has taken six months to install the equipment and establish a satellite connection for the feed.
The trust wants to plant half a million trees on the reserve in the next three years. It employs 20 local people full-time to work in the reserve, which has won recognition from the national government and is run entirely by Ecuadorian nationals. Altogether, the WLT has bought up eight reserves in the Ecuadorian region in partnership with the Fundación Jocotoco.
Fundación Jocotoco is an Ecuadorian organisation established to protect areas of critical importance to the conservation of Ecuador's 1,600 birds species - about 17% of the world's total, and almost as many as neighbouring Colombia and Peru, both of which are countries about five times as large.
